Agate Credit Only by Name Surname34 11.8.20 Photographs by Nicole Craine for The New York Times
the pandemic, a lot of people were in pre-
carious situations,’’ she went on. ‘‘They were
working low-wage jobs, they were barely
making rent. They were already teetering.’’
Cohen Morris is tall and slender, with a
pierced nose and a pair of tattoos twisting
up the inside of each forearm, one reading
‘‘redemption’’ and the other ‘‘reconciliation’’ in Greek. Born in Manhattan,
Cohen Morris was raised in Georgia, where her evangelical parents moved
to open a leather-repair business. In 2014, she and her husband bought their
fi rst house, in Doraville, and Cohen Morris took a job teaching English at
nearby Cross Keys High School. Later, she founded a nonprofi t organization
called Los Vecinos, or the Neighbors, which advocated on behalf of the res-
idents of the low-income apartment complexes that line Buford Highway.
Her work won her support from Doraville’s Latino population, and last fall,
she put her name on the ballot for Doraville’s City Council. She was sworn in
on Jan. 4, two days before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
issued a travel warning for Americans planning on visiting Wuhan.
‘‘I remember in March, right when all the schools were closing, I said to
my husband, ‘Well, this is something that’s going to aff ect us all, all over the
world,’ ’’ Cohen Morris told me. She scoff ed at her own naïveté: ‘‘ ‘We’ll all
be in it together! We’ll support each other.’ ’’ But new infections in Doraville,
Chamblee and Brookhaven quickly exceeded those in more aff luent parts
of DeKalb County. In April, unemployment in DeKalb was at 13.3 percent,
higher than the statewide rate of 12.6 percent, itself the highest for Georgia
in decades. Cohen Morris was deluged with text messages from friends who
had lost cleaning or service-industry jobs.
Doraville is approximately 55 percent Hispanic, and the areas border-
ing the highway are populated largely by recent immigrants — many of
them undocumented, according to Cohen Morris. Although the coronavirus
forced a reduction in the pace of raids by Immigration and Customs Enforce-
ment agents, many residents of Doraville discovered that a new threat had
emerged. ‘‘If you’re undocumented,’’ Cohen Morris said, ‘‘you can’t get food
stamps, you can’t get assistance from HUD’’ — the Department of Housing
and Urban Development — ‘‘and you can’t get stimulus money.’’
In the reopening of the state, some of Cohen Morris’s constituents saw
hope: If business did pick back up, restaurants and hotels and construction
sites would need cheap labor again. But others were terrifi ed. ‘‘My friends
were saying, ‘Well, I’m stuck, because I need to work, I don’t have enough
savings to stay home, but I don’t want to get sick,’ ’’ Cohen Morris recalled.
By April 20, DeKalb County alone had reported more than 1,500 total cases
of coronavirus. By April 30, the total had risen to more than 2,000.
To Cohen Morris, the fact that Kemp was reversing the lockdown was
cause enough for alarm. States like Minnesota were keeping residents at
home through June; in Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican,
would not allow the state to enter the fi nal phase of reopening until July.
Some of Georgia’s neighbors in the Southeast were putting into place what
Cohen Morris felt were more common-sense measures: Tennessee, for
example, reopened in late April but permitted individual counties to help
shape their own plans and protocols. Even President Trump seemed skepti-
cal, suggesting after Kemp’s announcement that Georgia could ‘‘wait a little
bit longer. Just a little bit, not much. Because safety has to predominate.’’
Kemp’s approach left no room for municipal governments to be fl exible:
Local regulations, he ordered, could not be ‘‘more or less restrictive’’ than the
state mandate. ‘‘Our orders sought to bring clarity to Covid-19 restrictions
statewide,’’ Cody Hall, a spokesman for Kemp, told me recently, arguing
that the diverging local rules throughout the state were often confusing. But
Cohen Morris said: ‘‘It was a big blanket directive, and it left us no agency
to do what was right for us.’’ She added: ‘‘The governor wanted businesses
to reopen, but he didn’t really care what happened to the people who had to
work there. He wanted to wash the state’s hands of having to support them.’’n May, in the parking lot of a taqueria off Buford Highway,
I met a woman named Maria, whom Cohen Morris knew
through her previous work with Los Vecinos. Dark-haired
and short, with rounded features and wide-set almond eyes,
Maria — who asked to be identifi ed only by her fi rst name on
account of her family’s immigration status — was in her mid-
60s. She and her youngest daughter came to the United States
from Monterrey, Mexico, in 2003 to join Maria’s then-hus-
band, a janitor at a local hotel. Maria and her daughter, whom
she asked be identifi ed only by her fi rst initial, G., stayed.
Maria’s ex-husband did not. ‘‘We were fi ghting about money;
we fought about everything,’’ she told me. After he left, she
took a series of odd jobs: house cleaner, cook at McDonald’s,
cashier at a popular hair salon on Buford Highway.
In 2018, G., who has Down syndrome and a heart con-
dition, graduated from high school. ‘‘While G. was still in school, she had
friends, she had her teachers,’’ Maria said. ‘‘She could take unpaid intern-
ships at places like Kroger and Pizza Hut. It made her feel valuable. It
made her feel like she was needed. But she does not have papers, and after
graduation, all of that went away. I thought: What’s a job that we can do
together, so I can be there for my daughter?’’
She settled on baking and set out to relearn some of her late mother’s
favorite recipes: chocolate fl an, small cakes, pay de queso (a Mexican cheese-
cake). Her daughter enjoyed being her assistant, and the two other immi-
grants who shared their two-bedroom apartment on Buford Highway were
happy to serve as taste testers. ‘‘They liked the free samples,’’ Maria joked.
‘‘My fl an is very strong.’’ Three or four times a week, in the evenings, Maria
and her daughter would walk to the taquerias that lined the highway and
sell pastries and bouquets of fresh fl owers Maria arranged herself to the
customers waiting in line for takeout.
‘‘We made very little,’’ Maria told me. ‘‘About $80 a day.’’ It was just enough
to cover her phone bill, medications and groceries, plus the monthly rent
on their bedroom — though she’d had to accept $200 in rent relief from Los
Vecinos. ‘‘I don’t like to take handouts,’’ Maria said. ‘‘I want to be able to work
for my money. But sometimes you trust in God.’’
In the fi rst weeks of the lockdown, Maria and G. spent no more than an
hour a week outside their apartment. Their sole forays into the world were
supermarket runs, for which they donned every piece of protective gear
available to them: surgical gloves, sunglasses, homemade paper masks.
Maria’s age and high blood pressure put her at risk, and her daughter
had her heart condition. ‘‘Imagine one of us gets sick,’’ Maria told me in
late April. ‘‘We’re both going to get sick. Because we’re together at every
moment. We live in the same small room.’’ Maria believed she could handle
it if G. contracted Covid; she was sure she could nurse her daughter back
to health. The idea of getting sick herself, though — it terrifi ed her. What
would happen to her daughter then?Below: Cakes and
pastries that Maria
and her daughter
G. were selling at a
restaurant off
Buford Highway.